Most children and adolescents with cancer have mild COVID-19 disease and make a full recovery, a new study by Haeusler et al in the European Journal of Cancer has found. But pediatric patients with cancer and underlying health conditions, severe infections, and low white blood cell counts were...
Patients with two out of the three most common types of advanced breast cancer now have an average survival time of at least 5 years, according to a panel of experts at the Advanced Breast Cancer Sixth International Consensus Conference (ABC6), which was held virtually this year. The Advanced...
Oncology practices that participated in a quality improvement project that included ASCO’s Quality Oncology Practice Initiative (QOPI®) and ASCO Quality Training Program (QTP) were able to make improvements in the care provided to underserved populations in their communities, according to a recent...
About 10 years ago, on a flight to Detroit, while returning from the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium, I had a conversation with Lori Pierce, MD, FASTRO, FASCO, radiation oncologist at the University of Michigan, who went on to become ASCO President for the 2020–2021 term. I recall inviting her...
David Morse Livingston, MD, formerly the Charles A. Dana Chair in Human Cancer Genetics at Dana-Farber and the Emil Frei III Distinguished Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, died unexpectedly on October 17, 2021. He was Deputy Director of the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center (DF/HCC) ...
World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, MD, honored the late Henrietta Lacks with a WHO Director-General’s award, recognizing her world-changing legacy. Ms. Lacks, a Black American woman, died of cervical cancer 70 years ago, on October 4, 1951. While she...
The Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center–Jefferson Health (SKCC) has named Marcia Brose, MD, PhD, FASCO, as Vice Chair of Medical Oncology and SKCC Regional Chief of Cancer Services at Jefferson Torresdale Hospital in Northeast Philadelphia. Dr. Brose’s areas of expertise include thyroid cancer, rare...
“A lot of times, younger bright physicians are afraid to say what they really think, out of fear of challenging the dogma. One of the things I do when mentoring is to ask why we are doing a particular therapy or intervention. I tell my mentees not to let the data interfere with your knowledge,”...
In this installment of the Living a Full Life series, guest editor Jame Abraham, MD, spoke with Aleix Prat, MD, PhD, Head of the Medical Oncology Department, Hospital Clinic of Barcelona. Dr. Prat, a breast cancer researcher, is currently working to identify strategies to tailor treatment for...
Hossein Borghaei, DO, MS, Chief of the Division of Thoracic Medical Oncology at Fox Chase Cancer Center, has been named one of three winners of the second annual Lung Cancer Heroes awards program. Dr. Borghaei, who is a co-leader of the Molecular Therapeutics Program at Fox Chase and an authority...
People with blood cancers are at a higher risk than healthy individuals for severe infection with COVID-19; furthermore, research suggests that they do not always achieve optimal protection from vaccination. A new study published by Pagano et al in the journal Blood—the first to report on...
“Nodal status remains the single most important prognostic marker in outcomes for women with estrogen receptor–positive, HER2-negative breast cancer. For that reason, it makes sense to think about optimizing adjuvant therapy, including endocrine treatments, chemotherapy, and targeted therapy,”...
In a recent study published by Stacey Fedewa, PhD, and colleagues in the journal Cancer, unemployed individuals were less likely to have health insurance and be up to date on getting recommended cancer screening tests. Analyses revealed that their lack of health insurance coverage accounted for...
The invited discussant of the FIRSTMAPP study, Rocio Garcia-Carbonero, MD, of Hospital Universitario 12 de Octubre, Madrid, emphasized that pheochromocytoma and paraganglioma are rare tumors, and once they become metastatic, which is even more rare, there are few treatment options. “This is very...
In a study published by Gauvin et al in JNCCN–Journal of the National Comprehensive Cancer Network, researchers examined over 200 patients with gastrostomy tubes and highlighted the need for a multidisciplinary approach to palliative care decision-making for patients with cancer. A gastrostomy tube ...
Results of the European Society for Medical Oncology’s (ESMO) Women for Oncology monitoring and authorship studies were recently published by Berghoff et al in ESMO Open. They revealed that women continue to be underrepresented in leadership positions despite making up an increasing proportion of...
Non-Hodgkin lymphoma is one of the most common cancers diagnosed in the United States, accounting for nearly 4% of all cancers. This year, about 81,600 individuals will be diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma, and nearly 21,000 will die from the cancer. A study by Ocier et al published in Cancer...
Rising cost-sharing requirements from private insurance have exacerbated the financial burden for patients with cancer, according to research presented at the 2021 ASCO Quality Care Symposium.1 Analysis of claims data on the four most prevalent cancers in the United States—female breast,...
The invited discussant of this study on patient-reported outcomes, Areej El-Jawahri, MD, Associate Director of Cancer Outcomes Research and Education Program and Director of Bone Marrow Transplant Survivorship Program at Massachusetts General Hospital, said these findings underscore the importance...
According to data presented during the 2021 ASCO Quality Care Symposium,1 1-month changes in patient-reported outcomes may predict treatment response and survival outcomes in patients with advanced gastrointestinal cancers. The results of a prospective study of 159 patients with metastatic...
As reported in The Lancet Oncology by Susana Banerjee, MBBS, PhD, and colleagues, 5-year follow-up of the pivotal phase III SOLO-1/GOG 3004 trial has shown a median progression-free survival of 56 months with maintenance olaparib following response to platinum-based chemotherapy in newly diagnosed...
Findings from a novel telemedicine effort to screen patients for lung cancer screening during the COVID-19 pandemic show that virtual single-visit screenings may be just as effective as single-visit screenings done in person, according to a study presented by Magarinos et al at the American College ...
On October 29, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) authorized the emergency use of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine for the prevention of COVID-19 to include children aged 5 through 11 years. The authorization was based on the FDA’s thorough and transparent evaluation of the data that...
Cleveland Clinic researchers have shown that diet-associated molecules in the gut may be associated with aggressive prostate cancer, suggesting dietary interventions may help reduce risk. These findings were published by Reichard et al in Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention. While...
The incidence of pancreatic cancer—which historically has been higher in men than in women—has increased among both men and women during the past decade, with a significantly greater relative increase observed in women younger than age 55 years, and especially among those aged 15 to 34 years. These ...
Patients with multiple myeloma lacking an antibody response to COVID-19 vaccine may also fail to mount a T-cell response, according to research from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Concerningly, this scenario was most common among patients actively treated with anti-CD38 and...
Both dose-escalated radiation therapy and short-course androgen-deprivation therapy (SADT) have been shown to improve outcomes in patients with intermediate-risk prostate cancer. Researchers then posed a new question—is giving both modalities upfront to newly diagnosed patients of benefit? Findings ...
Patients with hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) awaiting liver transplantation may benefit from noninvasive treatment with external-beam radiotherapy (EBRT) but are rarely given this therapy, according to a new analysis of U.S. national data. Findings were presented by Nima Nabavizadeh, MD, at the...
Part 2 of the latest Annual Report to the Nation on the Status of Cancer—provided by the American Cancer Society, National Cancer Institute, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and North American Association of Central Cancer Registries—has found that patients with cancer in the United...
The time required to secure prior authorization approvals for radiation therapy equates to a financial impact of more than $40 million annually for academic medical centers, according to a new study presented by Bingham et al at the 2021 American Society for Radiation Oncology (ASTRO) Annual...
Moderator of the session on oncology drug pricing, Arjun Gupta, MBBS, Assistant Professor of Medicine at the University of Minnesota Medical School, observed that generics alone may be insufficient to slow the astronomical rise of drug prices. “The general thinking has always been that generics...
Despite the promise of precision oncology, the cost-effectiveness of targeted treatments remains open to debate. According to Aakash Desai, MD, MPH, there is an urgent need for drug-pricing reform, given the average expenditure of Medicare Part D. An analysis of the Medicare database presented...
On October 22, Oncopeptides announced its decision to withdraw melphalan flufenamide (Pepaxto), a first-in-class peptide-drug conjugate, from the market in the United States, following results from the phase III OCEAN study in patients with relapsed or refractory multiple myeloma. The decision to...
The first indication I had stage IV lung cancer was a persistent cough during the beginning of the cold-and-flu season in the fall of 2013. I was 35 years old, never smoked, and in otherwise excellent health, so I ignored the cough for several months until I noticed my breathing had also become...
The delivery of high-quality cancer care relies on a vast network of dedicated experts, some of whom work assiduously behind the scenes, building and modernizing the very architecture on which the cancer community operates. One such person was Clayton Dunklin Pruett, an engineer by training, who...
The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center and Siemens Healthineers recently announced the collaborative development of a global education program focused on enabling the implementation of consistent, high-quality magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in radiation oncology. The program will...
The ASCO Post is pleased to reproduce installments of the Art of Oncology as published previously in the Journal of Clinical Oncology. These articles focus on the experience of suffering from cancer or of caring for people diagnosed with cancer, and they include narratives, topical essays,...
The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center and BostonGene Corporation recently announced a strategic alliance to advance the development and clinical integration of multiplatform biomarker signatures. Expands Upon Existing Collaborations The alliance brings together BostonGene’s innovative...
Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK) recently announced a $25 million gift from Louis V. Gerstner, Jr, to create the Louis V. Gerstner, Jr Physician Scholars Program. Designed to support the innovative research of physician-scientists who are early in their career at MSK, the program will...
In this installment of the Living a Full Life series, guest editor Jame Abraham, MD, spoke with Robert A. Winn, MD, Director of VCU Massey Cancer Center, Richmond, Virginia. In 2020, he became the first Black physician to lead a National Cancer Institute–designated cancer center. Among other...
According to the National Cancer Institute, cases of colorectal cancer in patients younger than age 50 have grown by more than 50% since the 1990s. Cleveland Clinic has addressed this trend with the establishment of a center focused on the diagnosis, care, and research of young-onset colorectal...
The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center recently appointed Caroline Chung, MD, Associate Professor of Radiation Oncology and Diagnostic Radiology, the new Vice President and Chief Data Officer (CDO). As the institution’s first-ever CDO, Dr. Chung will be responsible for shaping MD...
ASCO is calling on Congress to continue its bipartisan support of federally funded research. Robust, sustained, and predictable funding growth for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Cancer Institute (NCI) baseline budgets is critical in advancing our nation’s work toward...
The leading causes of mortality in the United States are cardiovascular disease (23%) and cancer (21%), accounting for more than 40% of total deaths reported.1,2 The increasing rise in health-care expenditures over the past several decades has driven the need for metrics to further evaluate the...
Study discussant Bruna Pellini, MD, of the Department of Thoracic Oncology, Moffitt Cancer Center, Florida, noted that, regardless of PD-L1 or tumor mutation burden status, the NADIM trial demonstrated improved progression-free and overall survival for patients with resectable, stage IIIA non–small ...
Pretreatment circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) levels in patients with non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) appear to be a more accurate predictor of long-term survival than classic survival surrogates, according to research presented during the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer...
Heather A. Wakelee, MD, FASCO, President of the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer (IASLC), who moderated a press briefing where the results of the Atezo-Brain trial were presented, called the study “beautiful work designed specifically” for patients with non–small cell lung...
Florida Cancer Specialists & Research Institute (FCS) recently appointed Michael Diaz, MD, to the position of President and Managing Physician, effective January 1, 2022. Dr. Diaz succeeds Lucio Gordan, MD, who has served in that position since 2018. Dr. Gordan will continue to practice as a...
Longer follow-up data from the phase III CheckMate 649 trial support the use of nivolumab plus chemotherapy as a new standard first-line regimen in patients with advanced gastric cancer, gastroesophageal junction cancer, and esophageal adenocarcinoma. The findings were reported by Yelena Janjigian, ...
Commenting on the SECOMBIT trial was Omid Hamid, MD, Chief of Translational Research and Immunotherapy at The Angeles Clinic & Research Institute, a Cedars-Sinai Affiliate, and Co-Director, Cutaneous Malignancy Program, Cedars-Sinai Cancer. Dr. Hamid said SECOMBIT addresses an important...